Federal grant aimed at improving transportation resources

Updated 11:02 pm, Monday, July 2, 2012

San Antonio received an $841,000 federal grant Monday to help better connect veterans, seniors and the disabled with transportation resources that can be difficult to find, especially in outlying communities.

The Alamo Area Council of Governments is one of 64 recipients in 33 states that received the U.S Department of Transportation's Veterans Transportation and Community Living Initiative grant.

AACOG currently operates a resource call center and website that mainly target seniors and the disabled, a population that already captures a significant portion of the area's veteran population. The grant will help the agency create a more modernized, “one-call, one-click” system called AlamoRides that improves existing services but also expands them to veterans of all ages and their families.

The service will be available throughout the 12-county AACOG region, which at more than 215,000 veterans has the highest concentration of veterans in Texas. About 40 percent of area veterans are over age 60.

In a Monday morning conference call announcing the grants, Robert A. Petzel, the undersecretary for health at the Department of Veterans Affairs, said veterans of all wars share a need for “transportation that they can depend on to build and maintain successful lives in their communities.”

Increasingly, younger veterans live in rural counties, said Federal Transit Administrator Peter Rogoff. Between 2005 and 2009, just under 50,000 veterans in the AACOG region lived in a rural county.

Under the new AlamoRides system, users will be able to go to a website or make a phone call and access a multitude of transportation options to fit their needs — such as a veteran in Atascosa County who uses a wheelchair but is struggling to secure a ride to an appointment at the Audie L. Murphy Memorial Veterans Hospital in Bexar County, Spinks said.

The program will lead the user through the different options. If none are available, the user will be routed to an options counselor at the existing Alamo Service Connection call center, or to 2-1-1, Spinks said.